Prospective unicorns like Ola Cabs, Practo, Oyo Rooms, Freecharge and Housing. com, among several others, have encouraged students to start their own venture.In 2014, after months of brainstorming over numerous rounds of mid-night tea and deep-fried snacks, Ayush Agrawal and his three friends decided to drop out of IIT Kharagpur. They wanted to work on their startup idea.

It was not a difficult decision. IIT Kharagpur had recently introduced a “temporary withdrawal programme”, which allowed students to take a break from studies and pursue their entrepreneurial calling. Should the venture fail, they could always return to the campus to complete the course.

“The programme was kind of a back-up plan for us,” says Agrawal, who co-founded Intugine Technologies with his friends.

Intugine, which specialises in gesture motion control devices, is popular in the startup circuit. The company is now looking to raise a second round of funding from venture funds.

Agrawal, 22, says he and his colleagues might not go back to college now. “The only thing we miss is food from Tikkaa (a popular hangout joint near the Kharagpur campus).”

In the US, the lore of the tech industry is filled with many such touchstones — Bill Gates founding Microsoft or Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg starting his first software-based company after dropping out of school or college.

In India, such examples are rare and the word ‘dropout’ itself still invites scorn. That might be changing.

Besides IIT Kharagpur, which is toying with the idea of being “more liberal” with students with an entrepreneurial bent of mind, IITs in Delhi, Madras and Kanpur, a few NITs (National Institute of Technology) and private engineering colleges like Manipal Institute of Technology (MIT) and BITS-Pilani are all looking at offering students an option to drop out temporarily.

For many students harbouring entrepreneurial dreams, such an offering is godsend. In recent years, college campuses have turned a hotbed for startups across various sectors. Prospective unicorns like Ola Cabs, Practo, Oyo Rooms, Freecharge and Housing.com, among several others, have encouraged students to start their own venture.

A senior Microsoft official, quoting Thomson Reuters data, recently wrote in his blog that over 315 Indian tech startups have received funding from angel investors and venture capitalists between 2010 and 2013. This produced a total of 478 founders and co-founders. Of those, 228, or 47%, came from the IITs and IIMs.

Padmaja Ruparel, President of Indian Angel Network, says it is heartening to see that families (of students dropping out of college) and academicians are now showing more willingness to accept failure in whatever students do. “This option to return to college will spawn more campus startups.”

Take the case of Deepit Purkayastha, who took a one-year break from IIT Kharagpur to start ‘News InShorts’, a mobile app that delivers news in 60 words, containing only essential facts.

“We could not have waited for the course to end. We had to catch the smartphone boom that was raging across the country, and had to start the venture at that time,” says Purkayastha.

Once the mobile app was up and running (with over 3 million subscribers currently), Purkayastha returned to the campus to secure his computer science degree.

Some teachers frown if students who take the offer do not return. “Once they make it big, they would not want to complete the course. Even students who failed in their venture would find it difficult to complete their course if there’s a break in between,” argues KR Venugopal, principal of University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering, Bangalore.

Some Riders, Please!

This has made forced institutions to introduce strict conditions. IIT Delhi allows students to take academic breaks for up to two semesters, but for a year.

Graduate courses in IITs have eight semesters that students need to mandatorily complete. If students decide to drop out from one semester, they will not be registered for that semester, but they continue to be on the rolls.

“We started the one-year break option to encourage students who are interested in pursuing their own ventures. These students find it very difficult to handle both their enterprise and studies at the same time. The one-year break will help them focus on their venture,” says Anurag Sharma, dean – academics at IIT Delhi.

PP Das, professor - department of computer science & engineering, IIT Kharagpur, says his institution allows students temporary withdrawal for two semesters. “But it has to be properly certified by the mentor professors.”

Besides parents and teachers, investors too have embraced the idea of dropouts starting a business. “Being a dropout, to some extent, helped our case. Investors appreciated the headway we got in business. They liked our thought clarity. Investors do not have any taboo investing in startups by dropout entrepreneurs,” says Ankit Oberoi, co-founder, Adpushup, an ‘AdTech product’ that helps clients optimise online ad revenues by using advanced algorithms.

Oberoi and his partner Atul Agarwal dropped out of their BBA course (in the first year) to start their own venture. Adpushup mobilised over “half-a-million US dollars” in the first round from a group of investors a few months ago.

“If education institutions are becoming more liberal, in terms of giving more elbow room to students, there’ll be more dorm-room startups,” says Oberoi.

Vinod Murali, MD of Innoven Capital, which has funded over 100 startups since 2014, says there’re several young dropouts who manage their startups very well.

“There are experienced graduates who mismanage also. As an investor, we’re not worried about qualification or age of the entrepreneur, as long as the business idea is good.”

So far it was anxious family members and societal pressures rather than worries about funding that prevented youngsters from discontinuing their studies and starting a venture.

Students from conservative backgrounds also dread the tag of being just a “baarvi pass” (12th class pass), in case their business ventures failed. A ‘return to campus’ option, like the ones started by premier engineering colleges, will go a long way to assuage such fears.

“Parents are more open to the idea of dropping out now. Support from colleges will help students convince their parents,” says Oberoi.

Private engineering colleges like MIT and BITS Pilani have the leeway to give “academic break” to students desirous of starting a venture. The four-year bachelors’ engineering programme offered by these institutions can be extended to 8 years if respective academic councils feel their students have a genuine startup idea.

“There’s no need for us to get any extra permission to allow students a sabbatical if they have a genuine startup idea. We’re not against the idea of giving students some two years’ time-off to focus on their startups,” says GK Prabhu, Director of Manipal Institute of Technology.

S Arul Daniel, Dean (academic) at NIT Trichy, holds similar views. “Our four-year BTech programme can be completed in 6 years; so if any student is keen to take a break and focus on his start up idea, we’ll not say no to him,” he adds.

These institutions, at some level, are aping the curriculum structures of foreign universities, which liberally allow their students to take breaks between course semesters. Ivy league colleges like Harvard University, Stanford and Massachusetts Institute of Technology have similar liberal policies to encourage and mitigate the risk for students who want to start their entrepreneurial ventures.

“By allowing a break between semesters, these institutions are allowing students to gain work-related experience and make them job-ready,” says Ajay Ramasubramaniam, director, Zone Startups, an accelerator jointly managed by Ryerson University Canada and BSE Training Institute.

However, a few successful “dropout entrepreneurs” like Kunal Shah of Freecharge feel that merely by giving a “few semesters break” would not help much in creating a startup ecosystem on campuses.

“They have to encourage innovation and appreciate problemsolving skills of students. If a talented student has a great business idea, he’d drop out anyway,” says Shah. “Besides, one cannot do great stunts with a safety net,” he says.